Sir, - The nurses' dispute highlights the serious flaws in our system of industrial relations and salary negotiations. Packages, linkages and unnecessary interventions should be ended, and the limitations of productivity, flexibility and restructuring should be exposed.
Packages require unpalatable elements to be put in with benefits. Thus, the nurses' package entails that entrants to the profession should have their salary reduced if senior nurses are to have theirs increased. This is illogical and unfair, and 97 per cent of nurses understandably object to it.
Linkages require that, if nurses receive an increase in salary, so must doctors, physiotherapists, dietitians, radiographers, porters, maintenance men, ambulance crews, the fire brigade, the guards, the prison warders, and so on ad infinitum.
The Government should take courage and end linkages and relativities for good. There are plenty of valid criteria that can be used to determine salaries: training (length, levels, cost, complexity, etc), work (hours, difficulty, length of service, intrinsic costs, tax deductions, scarcity of expertise, risks at work, legal liability, social needs, etc) and employer's situation (ability to pay, viability of firm, location, profits, etc).
Whatever its merits, productivity is applicable only to industrial operations. It has no real relevance to nursing, medicine, teaching, hair dressing and thousands of other occupations. This is not to suggest that hospitals, schools, hotels, hair dressing salons, etc, have no economic dimensions. Intruding productivity into non industrial operations is basically a Marxist concept which has been ironically adopted by Thatcherite economists and politicians.
Flexibility and re structuring have validity when new, specified and substantial tasks are undertaken with the agreement of employees. The consequent salary adjustments would obviously have to take into account the dropping of previous tasks, shorter hours, etc.
The nurses case for improved salaries and conditions should be considered on its own merits. This and similar special cases should be heard and decided by a tribunal of adjudicators with the competence, integrity and independence of the judiciary. As necessary, experts in industrial relations, personnel management, accountancy, the law, economics and the profession in question could be invited to advise the adjudicators. Their detailed verdicts should be made public.
It would be open to employees to be represented before the suggested tribunal by their union and other expert advocates. Employers could also be represented by their association and similar advocates. IBEC, ICTU, amalgams of public employee unions, et al, should withdraw to their proper spheres of activity.
A group taking a case to a special cases tribunal should forego industrial actions for the duration and both parties to a dispute should accept the verdict of the tribunal. The group should not be allowed to take another case for at least a year, but it would be open to the group to appeal a decision of the tribunal to the courts on grounds of constitutional or statutory infringement, natural injustice or improper procedures.
A tribunal to deal with special cases like the nurses is compatible with national, regional (e.g. a health board) and sectoral (e.g. banks, breweries, etc) wage agreements. With the practice of linkages abolished, the dreaded free for all and knock on effects could not arise.
Given the time constraint, it is Health to put through comprehensive legislation quickly for a permanent tribunal for special cases, but it is possible for him to set up an ad hoc tribunal to hear the urgent nurses case on its merits - with no packages, linkages, productivity or irrelevant flexibility and re structuring. Given their history of patience, the nurses are most likely to defer their industrial action for the sake of a fresh, fair hearing. - Yours, etc.,
229 Templeogue Road,
Dublin 6W.